Just a word about Christmas 2007:

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Yup.

That says it all.

I did a post on Notepad yesterday, and would have posted the thing, but I was overrun by kids and grandkids, wound up babysitting, and that was the end of that. I took a four-year old Christmas shopping, while she graced me with Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer, over and over. I will avoid that in the future. With age comes wisdom.
The Day is almost here and once again I am running behind. I intend to wind it up today and tomorrow so I can actually enjoy Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. That should be different. And somewhere in there I have to clean the office. Got a nifty bonus and a full week's pay for a three-day week! Plus, a bag of dark chocolate that would hype up every child in this 'hood. Bosslady knows me sooooooo well!!
My little neighborhood actually received Official Hood Status two weeks ago. After playing games all afternoon with the Sheriff's Department by firing guns, and then disappearing, they shot up a trailer. Nice.
Then all heck broke loose with kids dressed in black and the Boys In Blue. Running everywhere, jumping bushes and fences. Sitting on your backside at the Huddle House is piss-poor training if you have to do a cross-country sprint with skinny wannabes in Nikes. Sirens, blue lights, spotlights, and those big bust-a-head flashlights lent a pretty glow. And the sirens were the cherry on top. My favorite touch is always The Drug Squad, who hauled off a kid from next door. We found .38 cal. brass in the back-yard garden. VERY nice.
Peace On Earth, Good Will Towards Men. We can only hope...................

Made tea cakes-----48 of 'em-----per special request from the Assembly Department at the plant where T-Bird and Oldest work. One older man (way older) said that when he took that first bite, it took him back to his Momma. He said that they tasted just like hers, which is high praise indeed, and that he hadn't had a tea cake since before she passed away. She's been with The Lord a long time now. That meant a lot to me, so I got a Blessing, and the old man got the recipe. That's a big return for a couple of cookies!!!!

Once again, The Grinch, a.k.a. T-Bird, has peed in my Wassail Bowl and refuses to let me put the decoration I want on the front lawn. One plastic Santa in his sleigh, pulled by eight plastic pink flamingos. I've asked for this for 17 years, and I have been shot down every time. I don't understand. Is that so much to ask????? I think it would be funny. I wish I had come up with it myself, but the credit/blame goes to Lewis Grizzard, may he rest in peace.
Other neighbors have done worse. We had neighbors who bought every light-up Christmas yard decoration ever made, and twenty miles of light strings. I lived across the road, and my trailer had a big bay window in the kitchen that faced their front yard. When they threw the switch, my kitchen lit up like it was high noon. You could see it from space.
If you have access to little kids, bundle the little boogers up, and take them around to look at Christmas lights. You get the best look at Christmas through the eyes of small children. It'll give you a glow until you can get to the eggnog.

Say hello to Pogo, the creation of Walt Kelly. Pogo is a possum, if you didn't already know. Created in 1943(dependin' on what website you check), he is the spokespossum for the Okefenokee Swamp, and Georgia's "ofishul" State Possum. You may have grown up reading the Pogo comic strip. And his smilin' face has decorated the water tower in Waycross, Georgia for decades. Pogo has a sweet, thoughtful disposition.



This is NOT Pogo, and he is NOT smiling. The front end of a possum is the "business end". Those teeth are damnably sharp, and I think they continue through the thing all the way to the anal sphincter.
This is what my daughter found in her bathroom closet.
Thanks to an ever-vigilant beagle, she found a young one in the closet and scared it off before it could get into the rest of the house. She scared it by screaming and slamming the closet door, and the barking of the dog probably gave the critter the idea it was unwelcome. When she screwed up the nerve to open the door again it was gone. It exited through the hole that the drain-pipe goes through. It was probably looking for water because of the drought. My son-in-law needs to get busy with some household repairs.
Usually, you can find possums on the roads---just a mangled lump of gray fur. But at the plant where my husband and son work, new employees are warned to look before they throw trash into a garbage can or stick their hands into pipe. T-Bird found a mother with offspring in a trash can once, and she took exception to him throwing trash onto her and her babies. And she let him know it. They hiss and blow like a demon possessed. You've heard the old expression; "Playin' possum". They ain't playin, People! He turned the can over onto it's side, and Momma Opossum walked away with her younguns hangin' onto her. She didn't run, she knew she didn't have to. They have plenty of attitude and the teeth to back it up, and they know it.
Years ago, my ex and I were walking down an old dirt road with one of his buddies, and we came up on one. Then it came up on US! It was huge, and it charged us at full throttle. That's how I know what they sound like. My ex threw up his rifle and fired at it, while his bud was screaming "Don't shoot it! Don't shoot!" Several shots later the possum was dead, and the buddy was upset. He wanted to catch it and take it to his uncle, because his uncle liked to eat them. Yep, lots of older folks around here love the things. I'll have the chicken, thank you!
If you take a notion to try this delicacy, you have to catch the thing alive---nope, I don't know how---and keep it in a cage for at least two weeks. Feed it nothing but cornbread and buttermilk to clean it out. It has to be cleaned out because of what it eats, which is pretty much anything it finds. No matter how long it's been dead. I could tell you a story about that, but you wouldn't like it. We'll just say that they ain't picky eaters, and let it go at that. One friend of the family doesn't care if they are cleaned out or not; he's not a picky eater, either. If he's cookin', I ain't eatin'!
Now, according to old-timers, if someone offers you a possum for your dinner, and it is already skinned, don't take it if it doesn't have one foot left on it. The foot is for identification purposes. Same thing with raccoons. "No foot, no thanks" is the rule. I'm just guessing here, but possums and coons must look a lot like cats and dogs if they have no tell-tale characteristics, like feet and fur. People have been fooled before. I remember seeing ads in the paper for possums, and I've seen older people keep them in cages while cleaning them out. They don't make good pets, but are good with sweet potatoes. Or so I've been told. I'll take their word for it.
I had a boyfriend once that caught one bare-handed. Whilst out drinking beer and riding dirt roads one night, a possum ran across the road and went into a ditch. The beer said "You can catch that!" And Ding-Dong said "Yes, I can!" And he did. I asked how that turned out for him. "Oh, they had to take me to the emergency room for stitches." This told me three things about this boy: 1.) He is an idiot. 2.) He drinks too much. 3). He is an idiot. The "idiot" part bears repeating, so I did.
I got bit by one when I was in about the third grade. My teacher was an animal lover, and had come across an abandoned baby possum. So she brought it to school and we took turns feeding it with an eye-dropper. When it was my turn, it bit me. Since it was so small, it didn't have the force of an adult, so it was more like being pinched with pliers. Not too bad, and it didn't even bleed. My mother never cared much for that particular teacher.
T-Bird used to deer hunt a lot. One of his favorite stands was a platform-type stand built onto a large tree, with plenty of room. He said that if you were in that stand at the right time in the morning, a full-grown possum would climb the tree, walk past you like you weren't there, crawl out to a fork in a limb, and go to sleep. Come the evening, the possum would wake up, walk past, and go down the tree to do whatever a possum does. T-Bird never would kill anything he didn't intend to eat, and the possum probably figured that T. was too gamey to eat, even for him.

In the words of an immortal bumper sticker: "Eat Mo' Possum", ya'll!

When I woke up this morning, like most people, I had to run for the bathroom. The human bladder will only hold so much for so long.
Rounding the corner to the potty, I found my husband, on his knees, locked in a lover's embrace with the commode. And he was NOT whispering "sweet nothings" to it.
I didn't have the time to inquire about this, and he didn't seem to be up for a game 20 Questions, so I ran to my daughters bathroom, figuring that she was still in bed. I grabbed the doorknob......and got a handful of toothpaste. From the doorknob. A handful!
By now, I am in full distress, so I don't give a rip in Hades about WHY I have a hand full of toothpaste. I'll sort it out later----I just need to pee!
Princess is on her throne. I apologize while I dance from foot to foot, and in a weak voice she begs for toilet paper. She has run out during the night. She's not going anywhere either.
Back down to the other end of the trailer I go, and this piece of porcelain still has a man wrapped around it, so I can give that one up; he was gonna be there a while.

It's amazing how long a house-trailer actually is when you are in a hurry to get to the toilet! Who knew I had that much space in a single-wide mobile home????

I grabbed a new roll--I had re-upped on t.p., thank goodness-- and now I'm hauling tail (and a full bladder) back to my daughter.
I will confess that I threw the roll at her, not in any sort of anger, just urgency. And I told her to PLEEEAAASE alert me when she is finished. Of course, I got another handful of toothpaste from the doorknob.
If you position yourself half-way between two bathrooms, you can run like a rabbit for the first one that flushes. My teeth were floating by now! And I had a lot of toothpaste on my nightgown.
Youngest got finished first, and when I made for that bathroom, I grabbed the doorknob again. Yep, toothpaste. How many times do you have to grab a doorknob to get the toothpaste off of it??? Who the heck knows? At least three times, by my count, although results may vary.
I made it without an accident. When I left the bathroom I took hold of the other side of the doorknob to open the bathroom door.....

I didn't even have to tell you by now, you've probably guessed...........MORE !@#$*&^ TOOTHPASTE!

A stomach virus explained my husband's and daughter's problems. So I can handle that. But the toothpaste?
That would be my oldest daughter, who I call Middlest because she is the "middle" child. When Youngest went for a day trip to another town 30 minutes away yesterday, she and her boyfriend ran afoul of a Christmas Parade. While trying to get around the parade route and find a particular store, they got lost. Totally lost. Hopelessly lost.
Rather than call me and T-Bird or his folks for directions, or stop to ask anyone else, they called Middlest on her cell phone. They didn't want me to know that they were lost, but they didn't know that Middlest was at my house, so I found out anyway. Middlest tried to help them via cell phone, but they can't find their butts with both hands and a flashlight. And a sister looking at MapQuest on the computer and telling them where to turn ain't helping either. It would have been okay, but the Moron Twins got the silly-giggles, and I guess their brains shut down. So I kept my granddaughters while my daughter and her husband went to find them and guide them back home.
Youngest and her boyfriend went to his parent's house when they made it back, and Middlest and son-in-law came here to pick up the babies.

This is where the toothpaste comes in. To "get even" with Youngest for giggling at her while she is trying to guide them home, and causing her to drive over heck-and-half-of-Georgia late at night to retrieve her and her boyfriend, this daughter squirted toothpaste on Youngest's doorknobs. On Youngest's end of this trailer she has a bedroom and a bathroom. The bathroom has two doors; one opens to her bedroom, the other opens into the hall. Six doorknobs in all, and Middlest is a very thorough-type person---she got all six knobs. Youngest can be grateful that I was out of Vaseline, and that her sister didn't think to smear the toilet seat with the stuff.

I've gotta have a talk with these kids. The Crest people will have a Merry Christmas. And Youngest is going to get a lesson in map-reading.

We got "hit" last night.
No sooner had I gotten it out of my mouth about the spray-paint crap, T-Bird caught a kid tearing up our vegetable garden with a rake.
He rounded the corner of the barn and caught the little jackass in the act. I won't repeat what he screamed at him, it was THAT bad, but the kid threw the rake and took off for the neighbor's fence, which is chain-link on that side. He's a chunky little shit, and realized real quick that he couldn't jump the thing, so he had to change directions in mid-flight and run down the back of the next property.
He had been playing with the kids next door and thought he was home free when he got back to their yard. Those kids turned on him so fast his head was spinnin'! T-Bird had a mouthful for him, and the neighbor's younguns were yelling "you're going to jail", and they gave T. his name without even thinking about it! They didn't even think about loyalty! They were yelling at him: "That man don't bother nobody, he's cool, and he's never done anything to us! You're a** is going to jail!"
And get this! The neighbor's kids MADE HIM APOLOGIZE!!!!!!!!! He didn't want to face my husband, who was looking like a pitbull at this point, and a rabid one at that! But the apology was accepted, more or less..
T. picked up the rake and went to give it to the neighbors----but it wasn't their rake! He had stolen a rake from some other yard to tear up our garden with!
To make matters worse for the kid, T. heard the oldest boy in the family yelling at the vandal: "come on, I ain't scared of your a** "---all of this was punctuated by the "N" word, and he almost got beat up by the buddies he thought would protect him.
The kids said that this 10-year old idiot got mad at THEM, so he took it out on OUR garden. I know he's young, but he has a lot of learnin' to do. And he knows that if ANYTHING happens to that patch of greens that isn't bug damage, we are going to give his name to the Sheriff's Department. And we can say that our next-door neighbor's kids are pretty cool kids.